The updated, 2024 Partners in Business handbook for owner-operator business, start to finish, is on its way. It will see official release at 2:45 p.m. on Friday, March 22, at the Mid-America Trucking Show attendant to our annual seminar with business services firm ATBS, coproducer of the manual with Overdrive.
There, ATBS Vice President Mike Hosted and longtime Overdrive contributor and owner-op business coach Gary Buchs will walk through cost, revenue and bedrock income benchmarks across major segments, data derived from the tens of thousands of clients who work with ATBS for tax and consulting services.
The goal? To deliver insights to apply to your own business, with a close emphasis on taking concrete steps now to position for better income when freight markets improve. And, crucially, build business to survive the next big downward economic cycle, always right around the corner.
As noted, ATBS data guides the path forward. Early insights gleaned from Hosted's analysis of year-end 2023 numbers show the owner-operator income declines reported at mid-year having halted, good news for everyone in trucking looking for the much-speculated-upon bottom of this freight business cycle. Since then, "we’re bouncing on the bottom," he said. "It seems like we’re at the end" of the long fall in freight demand, and rates.
The 2024
On the costs front, owner-operator variable costs (fuel, tires, maintenance, anything it takes to run the rig down the road) have been generally flat compared to 2022, when inflationary pressures spiked those big-time. Yet in 2023, inflation finally caught up to fixed costs, as many owners made hay of a return to reality in the used truck markets with falling prices to replace equipment "at a faster rate" than during the pandemic-induced truck-pricing crunch, Hosted added. Those purchases, though, came at higher interest rates, of course, among other factors driving an 8% year-over-year rise in fixed costs.
